New England Beyond Criticism
In Defense of America�s First Literature
Wiley-Blackwell Manifestos Series

?Elisa New?s book is a remarkable achievement. It is very rare that a critic manages to ask what seem exactly the right questions, then to answer them in a lively, brilliant, evocative, and supremely intelligent prose.?
Charles F. Altieri, University of California

?Elisa New is a refreshing voice among critics and historians of literature. She has a keen sense of the nature of New England and its deep spiritual resources, reaching back to the Puritans, moving through the great nineteenth-century expressions of interior landscapes and visions. This is a book I welcome and celebrate.?
Jay Parini, Middlebury College

Literary criticism of the past thirty years has undercut what the canonizers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw as the fundamental role of early New England in the development of American literary culture. And yet, a determination in literary circles to topple perceived Ivy League elitism and Protestant cultural creationism overlooks the continuing value, beauty, and even practical utility of a canon still cherished by lay readers around the world.

This Manifesto raises questions about how academic specialization and the academic study of New England have affected enthusiasm for reading. Using a range of interpretive practices, including those most often deployed by contemporary academic critics, Elisa New cuts across firmly established subfields, mixing literary exegesis with autobiographical reflection, close reading with cultural history, archival and antiquarian inquiry with experiments in style, and lays bare editorial orthodoxies, raising to question the whole hierarchy of values now governing the study of American and other literatures. Taking New England as a test case for a wider, more accessible set of critical practices, New England Beyond Criticism demands that the domain of literary study be opened further to the tastes of the general reader.

Acknowledgments vii

 1 Introduction: New England Beyond Criticism 1

Part I

Excitations: Protestant Ups and Downs 21

 2 Variety as Religious Experience: Four Case Studies: Dickinson, Edwards, Taylor, and Cotton 23

 3 The Popularity of Doom: From Wigglesworth, Poe, and Stowe through The Da Vinci Code 47

 4 “I Take—No Less than Skies—”: Dickinson’s Flights 75

Part II

Congregations: Rites of Assembly 103

 5 Lost in the Woods Again: Coming Home to Wilderness in Bradford, Thoreau, Frost, and Bishop 105

 6 Growing Up a Goodman: Hawthorne’s Way 140

 7 “Shall Not Perish from the Earth”: The Counting of Souls in Jewett, Du Bois, E.A. Robinson, and Frost 160

 8 Disinheriting New England: Robert Lowell’s Reformations 201

Part III

Matriculations: In Academic Terms 225

9 Winter at the Corner of Quincy and Harvard: The Brothers James 227

10 Upon a Peak in Beinecke: The Beauty of the Book in the Poetry of Susan Howe 235

11 Balm for the Prodigal: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead 265

12 A Fable for Critics: Autobiographical Epilogue 279

Index 308

Elisa New is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature and Language at Harvard University, USA. She is the author of The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry (2009), Jacob’s Cane: A Jewish Family’s Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore (2009), and The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (1999).